By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Hutchinson City Council discussed mask wearing briefly at their meeting Tuesday. Three of the five council members wore masks at the council table, Nancy Soldner, Jon Daveline and Jade Piros De Carvalho. Steve Garza and Sara Bagwell were not wearing masks. The discussion was in the context of whether to mandate masks in city buildings. City Manager Jeff Cantrell, who was not wearing a mask, noted that there are other ways to control public access to city staff, if necessary.
"If we felt that we had an exposure issue that could impact services as far as knocking employees out, that's when you're going to see some swift action on the part of staff coming forward and we'd probably recommend shutting the building down again," Cantrell said.
Mayor Jade Piros de Carvalho did note that the City of Hutchinson has enacted health related ordinances in the past.
"We enacted an ordinance that prohibited smoking in our parks," Piros de Carvalho said. "That's another instance of an ordinance we don't really have the manpower to enforce, but, just by virtue of having the ordinance has dramatically decreased the amount of smoking. Other citizens police each other on that."
Piros de Carvalho isn't sure how to make a mandate stick without enforcement, though.
"I'm curious where the threshold is," Piros de Carvalho said. "When do we pull a special meeting together and take action? Is that when we have 100 cases? Is that when we have 50 cases? We currently have around 30 active cases."
Because the public will have such strong opinions either way, the mayor didn't feel it was appropriate to take action without it being on the agenda and at this point the city is continuing to leave the policy decision in the hands of the county.
Council member Nancy Soldner appeared to not want to put policy in place without an enforcement mechanism and Jon Daveline seemed to agree with her on that point. Sara Bagwell wants to leave the responsibility to individuals. Steve Garza joined Bagwell in that opinion.